Henry Chesbrough
2011 Ranking: #38
Shortlisted: 2011 Thinkers50 Innovation Award
Henry Chesbrough, an adjunct professor at the Haas School of Business, at the University of California, Berkeley, is an internationally respected expert on innovation. He is also a visiting professor of Information Systems at Esade Business School in Barcelona, Spain.
Chesbrough has written extensively on the topic of innovation, but he is best known for his work on open innovation, a term that he helped popularize.
Open innovation, as the name suggests, describes innovation that occurs beyond the closed doors of a single organization. For example, the open source movement, which created the computer operating system Linux, is an extreme example of open innovation.
“Open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology,” says Chesbrough.
More recently, Chesbrough, who is an executive director at the Center for Open Innovation at Haas, has turned his attention to the world of services with his latest book Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era.
